Abashed the Devil Stood

The next couple weeks passed in much the same way, though with a few notable exceptions.

First, Fiona noticed with some measure of dark satisfaction that Loki wore his gloves religiously during their lessons and didn't attempt to make another connection between their minds. Even more satisfying, Embla had stopped forcing her into formal dresses after the first week, when she returned with the burnt or tattered remnants of her unwelcome wardrobe. The memory of her chamber maid's disapproving screech when she had walked into her rooms after that first lesson still got her through her more difficult days.

They held their sessions each morning in the loaned study and ended them each evening at sunset. They took three breaks for meals, which Loki insisted were necessary to allow the lesson to sink into her "primitive mortal brain", but which she suspected were more for his sanity than her education.

Truth be told, she was progressing quickly, something that Loki could no longer deny. After their first lesson, it became apparent that her magical education would indeed be as backwards as he had originally feared, and so the first three lessons plans were, to him, mind-numbingly simple. However, Fiona often punctuated these elementary discussions with the most astounding works of magic he had ever seen, and the constant demonstrations of her power were enough to keep him on his toes.

For example, on their third day of lessons, he had returned to the principles of spell deflection. After several failed attempts, they were both frustrated and the insults flowed easily between them. Angered by her impertinent attitude, Loki had sent a particularly vicious stab of magic her way, but it never connected, disappearing instead in a bright flash.

Fiona crowed in delight and shot a fist into the air.

"Ha HA! Did you see that?"

Loki was baffled.

"What... Where did -"

"I deflected it," Fiona explained, coming down from her emotional high with a huge grin on her face. "Probably toward the village."

Loki looked momentarily horrified. "You sent that piece of unholy magic into the peasant quarters?!" Gods, that spell would wreak death and destruction on the first living things it touched. The All-Father would definitely trace it back to him, and then he'd have to answer for yet another crime...

"Is that concern I hear?" she asked, sailing past him to inspect an intriguing title on one of the many book-lined shelves. "Oh, don't look so sour!" She tipped a book forward by its spine to inspect it, "I was only teasing. And no, not that exact spell. I changed it first."

If possible, he was even more horrified. "You... changed...?"

"Yep," she said simply, eyes flicking across the pages with interest. "I think it's called a well-wishing. You, sir," she spared him a wicked glance, "just gave someone a very nice day."

"I did no such thing!" he snapped, his hands balled so tight that the stitching on his gloves threatened to pop. "I would not stoop so low as to dally in... in hearthcraft!" He spat the word out like something poisonous.

She merely shrugged. "Well, as far as the townspeople know, you would. I changed the spell but it was still your magic." She returned her attention to the book. "Ooo, how long before we can do stuff like this?"

He sputtered indignantly at the injustice of it all, and wondered how long it would take for her to die if he wrapped his fingers around her throat and squeezed. No doubt, she'd just spirit herself away or find some other means to wriggle out of his grasp. So instead, he contented himself with the mental image of her gasping for air, clawing at his iron grip...

He found himself conjuring this image to mind often as the days progressed. The girl was infuriating beyond anything he had experienced. He often found himself sending some nasty spell her way - intended to bruise or madden or maim - but she would brush it off with ease and the occasional smug smile. When caught, he would claim that he did it only to test her resilience, but truthfully his failed attempts at probing and tapping her magic were becoming increasingly more frustrating. He could not comprehend how she could so easily push away his most advanced magical attacks and yet fail to grasp the simpler points of magic.

Even more harrowing, she soon took obvious delight in changing each of his deflected spells before sending them off to the nearby village. Soon, reports from local smallfolk were pouring in: bountiful harvests, healthy births, good weather, healed sicknesses, narrow escapes of certain injury, sudden windfalls, general happiness and prosperity... And of course, when the court mages were sent to investigate the sudden increase in good fortune, the magic was indeed traced back to him. He scowled at the thought of his magic being used in such a base manner. If indeed he had chosen to cast those spells of his own volition (which he never would, he thought in disgust) he would at least have the preservation of mind to cloak the source.

The fact that she could alter his spell at all was a point of astonished resentment. He knew firsthand that it was possible to deflect or to alter the intended target of a spell, though the latter took an astounding level of concentration and power to achieve. He had never heard of the ability to change the very nature of a spell. It was just one more mystery in the maddening thicket of complexities surrounding the girl...

All the same, the All-Father seemed to take the reports of his apparent magical intervention as a sign of penance and had formally invited him (through a dictated invitation, sent by a courier, Loki noted dryly) to join the royal family and courtiers back in the hall once a week for their nightly feasting. Although it had been days since the invitation, Loki had politely declined, opting instead to take his meals in his cell. He much preferred the hawk-like watch of the guards to the simpering, open-mouthed observers at court. Despite his refusal to attend court, he reveled in the luxuries that had been restored to him as a result of the girl's infernal interference. He was now occasionally permitted to walk about the castle grounds (with an armed escort, of course) and his access to the royal Archives had been restored as well, allowing him access to a much more vast pool of knowledge.

Not that he had much time to visit, he thought sulkily. His lessons with the human girl had proved to be much more taxing than he had previously accounted for. As they worked every day from sunrise to sunset, he hardly had a moment to himself. Most of his evenings he simply slumped straight into bed and fell immediately into desperate, blissful sleep.

All the same, he found the girl to be as intriguing as she was frustrating. Her easy mastery of some of the most complex forms of magic he had ever seen regularly amazed him, even when she struggled with the ridiculously easy aspects of casting. She was intelligent as well, despite his verbal insistence to the contrary. She learned easily and with rapt attention, even through his cruelest jests, and absorbed information with genuine relish. He found that getting her to understand troubling subjects was as simple as finding the right analogy. Her naturally empathetic nature allowed her to quickly shift her line of thinking, making her a flexible learner. Loki quickly found himself speeding through the lessons he had planned as she raced through the material.

Her intelligence also made her an annoyance as their verbal sparring continued. She had sharp wit and an even sharper tongue, and he found himself the object of more insults and sarcastic rebuttals than he wished to count. Most of his previous opponents had been shamed or enraged or humiliated at the receiving end of his silver tongue, but she shrugged off even the most vitriolic of his comments and returned with one of her own. Most days it set his teeth on edge, but very occasionally, it reminded him of the olden days where he had been accepted at his brother's table and had always been up for a good bout of drunken flyting...

There were bad memories there, too, but all the same Loki found himself noting his oafish brother's absence more and more as the days went on. No doubt frolicking with that human pet of his, Loki thought sourly. He wondered what it was about the mortal world that so fascinated Thor.

During Loki's brief time on Earth he hadn't found much in the way of thrill or challenge. The humans were weak, selfish, loud creatures, too caught up in their world of metal and smoke and electricity to foresee Loki's army advancing across space to capture their tiny, insignificant world. His downfall had merely been due to an oversight, an underestimation that he would not repeat. Although, he had a sneaking suspicion that, had Fiona added her considerable power to aid those pesky Earth heroes, his reign would have been even shorter lived.

That disturbing thought raised an entirely new set of questions, which he decided to test.

"Why is it that you did not aid your friends when the Chitauri invaded?" he asked one afternoon during a particularly difficult lesson on levitation.

She was wearing her Midgardian clothes, sitting cross-legged on the ground as he leaned on one of the corner pillars, watching her intently. The teacup on which she had been concentrating wobbled in midair and she deftly reached forward and caught it before it hit the ground. There was a long moment before she looked up at him with unease in her eyes.

"Why do you want to know?" she said finally.

"Curiosity," he answered. "Even without training, they could have used your abilities. Or were you too cowardly to fight?"

For once, she did not rise to his insults, but bowed her head so that her hair hung like a curtain in front of her face.

"You could say that," she replied heavily, and he was certain that he was about to witness a moment of weakness. Then, she shrugged the hair from her face and looked back up at him with an impish grin. "So, wait. You're saying you think my magic is superhero-level good?"

He frowned at her. "I want to know why S.H.I.E.L.D hadn't mobilized your abilities into some sort of weapon."

Her smile disappeared. "Ah. Well, it wasn't for lack of trying." She pulled herself up from the floor and turned her back to him as she delicately replaced the teacup to its nearby tray. "That's kind of a big question," she said slowly. "And it's more than I think you should know."

"Because it concerns me?" he said searchingly, picking up on her tone.

"Yes and no..." She turned to stare at him thoughtfully for a second. "How about a deal?"

It took a huge amount of self-control, Fiona thought, to keep the greedy curiosity out of his face, but his eyes still glittered with obvious interest.

"What kind of deal?" he asked with practiced nonchalance.

"A question for a question. You ask me, I ask you. You can expand on the question, but within reason. Truth only." Loki smirked, and she looked at him sharply. "And I can tell when you're lying, believe me."

His sarcastic grin said he didn't, but he nodded his head all the same and said, "Deal."

"Alright then," Fiona said seriously. "To answer your question, S.H.I.E.L.D. didn't trust me enough to let me tag along with the Avengers. They thought I might be working for you."

Loki eyed her sharply. "And why would they think that?"

She blew out a heavy breath in a very unladylike manner, disturbing an irregular lock of hair near her temple. It was one of the places she'd artlessly trimmed back after he'd singed it during their first lesson. He had no idea why she refused to let the skilled stylists of the royal house touch her hair, but the memory still made him smile every time he caught sight of her clumsy haircut.

"When you used the Tesseract to come to Earth it took a lot of magical energy, and the shockwaves resonated in my world. From what I gathered, those shockwaves triggered something and my powers spiked. S.H.I.E.L.D. has sensors everywhere, so it registered on their scanners almost immediately and they picked me up for... interrogation."

He didn't miss the bitterness in her tone at that last word, nor the forced neutrality of her entire story. She didn't seem to be lying, but he wondered what else she was keeping from him. As for her powers...

"Your magic is the same as the energy from the Tesseract?" he asked greedily.

She shrugged. "I'd say it's similar, but not identical. That's why S.H.I.E.L.D. couldn't manage to weaponize what they could siphon, like they had planned with the Cube."

"Then why did they not dispose of you? You were of no use to them."

Fiona gave him a humorless smile. "Oh, they wanted to, but Steve got wind of it and made a fuss. Captain America," she said at Loki's confused expression.

"The Soldier." He said it like a curse, but she only nodded.

"He didn't like the idea of innocent Americans being tortured and killed for crimes they didn't commit. And once they bothered to look into it, they found out I had a squeaky clean record, so they cut me a big fat reparations check and turned me loose... Well," she amended. "Sort of. They wanted me where they could see me, and Tony - that's Iron Man to you - was interested in me, so they put me up in Stark Tower. He did a few, less invasive tests to check up on my health and that's how they found out I was a ticking time bomb. He found a way to contact Thor." She gestured around her. "And now, here I am."

He frowned, still unclear on certain details. "That's not the whole story," he accused.

"Of course not," she admitted, "But I told you everything you needed to know. And some things that you didn't." Then, her attention focused on him again with laser beam intensity. "My turn. What exactly do you know about the Tesseract?"

He gazed back at her with a curious expression. "Very little," he lied smoothly. "I was sent to retrieve it with only minimal instructions. It seems my... employer was wise enough not to trust me."

Fiona looked at him stonily and said, "You're lying."

"And just how do you know that?"

"I can tell," she replied with a shrug. "You get this look in your eye. Smug. You enjoy lying because you're depriving people of information that they want. You value knowledge and you like being the exclusive holder."

His scowl turned into a dark grimace. This girl knew far too much. He stalked toward her until his frame towered menacingly over hers. "Prove it," he hissed.

"You know I can't," she replied sharply, "but I'm not stupid enough to think that you could activate the Tesseract from across the universe and use it to rip a hole in space big enough to pull an army through without knowing how it worked." Her hands went to her hips and her eyes narrowed. "Looks like I'm not nearly as stupid as you give me credit for, Prince."

He growled. "What possible interest could you have in the Tesseract?" he snapped. "You have enough trouble controlling your own power much less handling a magical artifact."

"You didn't answer my question," she persisted, well aware of the tension practically sparking between them. "And I'm not answering any of yours until you do."

Loki spun away from her with a silent curse, praising his self-control for not throttling her to death on the spot. Gods, how he hated this woman. He gripped the back of a nearby armchair so hard that it began to splinter and imagined it was her bones he felt snapping beneath his gloved fingers.

There was a long pregnant pause, and the tension hinted at barely-suppressed violence. Fiona could clearly hear his agitated breathing and waited for some kind of outburst. Instead...

"Truly," he said, his voice still tremulous with rage. He cleared his throat and tried again. "Truly, I know only a fraction of the Tesseract's true power. It contains a vast reservoir of energy, but the extent of its magic is greater than even I can comprehend. I doubt more than a few have gleaned as much from its depths as I," he said, and Fiona could detect a faint note of pride, "though I suspect my previous employer may have a better understanding of its true workings."

Then something happened that neither of them expected.

"Thanos."

Loki spun around faster than she thought possible, his face nearly wild with alarm. "What did you say?" he hissed.

"I... I don't know," she stammered. And it was true. She had no idea how or why, but the word had slipped from her mouth with frightening ease. To her knowledge she had never heard or read it before, but the word had come from her mind all the same. "Thanos," she repeated, but the word had no more meaning to her than the first time. "What is that?"

He stalked toward her with something dark and thunderous in his eyes. She didn't realize she had moved away from him until her back met with the hard surface of the bookcase behind her. His hands slammed into the wood on either side of her head, rattling dust and loose volumes from the shelves. "Where did you hear that name?" he spat, in a venomous whisper.

"I didn't," she babbled hurriedly. "I don't know where it came from! It was just-"

Her next words were cut off as he wrapped a gloved hand around her throat. "Do. Not. Lie. To. Me," he said in a voice that was all black silk and poison.

But instead of shrinking under his grasp, she felt her temper flare.

"I'm not lying, you insufferable ass!" Without flinching, she slid the sleeve of his choking hand up and wrapped her other hand around the bared skin of his forearm.

"Don't!" he shouted, just a moment too late.

With the familiar jolt, he was pitched out of his physical body... but this time was different.

Rather than standing above the chasm containing Fiona's power, he felt himself drifting in a wash of her emotions. She was angry, which he already knew, but it was the indignant outrage of someone who believed what they were saying. There was a fair amount of confusion as well, and fear, though she seemed to be more afraid of her unwitting knowledge than of Loki's threats.

Then her thoughts slammed into him with a brutal force. It was like being hit with his brother's wretched hammer, Loki thought. He could scarcely breathe as her thoughts laced insistently with his. He could clearly see their argument replay in her mind; he could see himself approaching her in blind fury; he felt the same baffled alarm that she had felt when Thanos's name fell from her lips, and he thanked the gods that she truly seemed to have no idea about its true meaning. Mostly though, he was startled at the way she viewed him.

He had peered into the minds of others before, and he had always been amused to see the way that their minds warped his image. His past lovers had seen him as alluring for his mysterious, brooding nature. His rivals had seen him as weak, scheming and dishonorable for his use of magic and his introverted tendencies. Those below him (and there were many, he thought) had seen him as untrustworthy and undeserving of his royal status. He had always played to the traits these people had created for him, and used their misconceptions to his advantage. But Fiona seemed to see him in the most objective light, closer to his true nature than any he had seen before.

True, she certainly didn't trust him. There was a significant feeling of bitterness about his attempted invasion of her home world, but she largely didn't let it affect her judgement or her ability to learn from him. Her feelings of annoyance and frustration were only due to their daily arguments, not with her people's inherent prejudice against his past actions. When he pushed a bit further, he was shocked to see that she even held him in some regard. She admitted that he was intelligent and skilled in magic. She was eager to learn from him, and excited at the prospect of studying magic under a master. She even felt, to his disgust, some pity for him. Thor had told her of his discovery of his parentage, and his resulting breakdown. She related to his misery and his resentment toward his family and himself. Somehow, she understood his motives with startling clarity.

He tried probing further into that train of thought and maybe uncover the memories associated with it, but a mental barrier slammed into place, effectively cutting off his journey further into her mind. The sheer force of that barrier was alarming, but he started even more when he realized that she had been gauging his emotions as well. When he pulled his attention inward he could feel her on the outskirts of his mind, silently watching his reaction to the thoughts revealed in her head. He cursed himself for being so thoughtless as to leave himself open to attack; he had been so enthralled with searching through her mind that he had completely forgotten. But oddly enough, she hadn't tried to go any further. She seemed to be waiting almost politely for him to finish his inspection.

Then he felt the tug signaling his mind's return to his body.

With a much less intense jerk, he felt himself reconnect with his physical form. Fiona had already returned, and she removed her hands from his wrist as he moved backward and flopped the nearest chair, suddenly exhausted. He put his head in his hands and closed his eyes, trying to control his suddenly heavy breathing and willing the weariness from his bones.

"I know you said not to touch you," Fiona said quietly, "but I needed you to understand that I was telling the truth."

He lifted his face from his hands to look at her. "You never even considered the possibility that I might be looking in your head for an easy way to kill you," he said dryly.

To his astonishment, she laughed bitterly.

"An easy way," she echoed humorlessly, and he was both baffled by the statement and the anger in her tone.

"What does that mean, exactly?" he probed, but her mask of determined placidity was back in place when she looked back at him.

"Maybe some other time," she said, just a touch wearily to his ears. "But really," she added, "I'm not sure how I knew that name. And..."

She looked down, licking her lips, and for some reason Loki found his eyes following the movement greedily.

"And I also wanted to see why it freaked you out so much," she looked up at him guiltily. "Whoever he is, you're afraid of him." He froze in his chair, but said nothing to deny it. "And your family... you're afraid for them. Which means he's powerful..."

He looked away in stony silence, and she sighed heavily.

"I won't tell," she promised. He glanced back at her dubiously. "I won't," she insisted. "But, Loki... you need to tell them sometime. If only to let them know you care..."

"But I don't care," he growled. "I owe them nothing."

But she had seen inside his head. They both knew it was a lie. Still, she didn't contradict him. He rose to his feet, looking out a nearby window.

"It's late," he said quietly. "That will be all for today."

He moved to open the door, but her hand closed over his gloved one. He immediately froze at the contact.

"Loki," she said softly. Then she looked up at him, and he was lost in the deep pools of her eyes. "Should I be afraid of him?"

It took him a moment to pull himself from her gaze and register her words. And another to answer.

"You'd be a fool not to. But, then, I don't place much stock in your intelligence."

She laughed again, but this time it swept the apprehension from her face in a single glorious instant. To their mutual surprise, he found the corner of his mouth twitching upward in genuine appreciation.

"I think that's as close to a compliment as-"

She stopped suddenly, cocking her head to the side for a moment as though listening for some far off sound. Loki stared at her, slightly annoyed and very confused. Her eyes widened.

"What -?"

"He's coming back," she said excitedly, turning her eyes back to his.

"Who?" he demanded, still completely confused.

"Your brother," she said quickly, scrambling to pull her jacket out from a tumbling pile of papers. "Thor's on his way right now!"

"That's ridiculous," he scoffed. "I would know the second he arrived."

But to his irritation, she hadn't even heard him. She had opened the door to speak urgently to the guards waiting for them just outside the study.

"Okay, we'll meet you there," he heard Fiona say, closing the doors before the guards could protest.

He looked at her quizzically as she took his hand once again.

"Remember to breathe," she instructed him, mischief and excitement shining in her eyes.

But before he could ask what she meant, there was a flash of bright light and a sharp tug just behind his navel.

Then, they were gone.